“Do you think that you are better, really better than the rest? Realize there is a problem, I know that you can give your best” shouted a popular German band fifteen years ago, in their best-selling rock song “Open Your Eyes, Open Your Mind”. Applied to contemporary international relations, these lyrics reflect well the embarrassed reactions [...]

Conferences, in our experience, can be very boring, but one that we found ourselves at last month was really thought-provoking. The subject was that old ‘chestnut’ of how to get development aid to Africa. It could have been a mind-numbing experience, despite the continued urgency of the issue, but it was transformed by the vitality [...]

Le Parlement européen a voulu par l’intermédiaire de sa commission LIBE (Libertés civiles, Justice et sécurité) faire le point à chaud. D’où sa réunion extraordinaire du 1er mars au matin à laquelle ont participé outre les députés, la présidence hongroise (le représentant permanent Peter Györkös), la Commission européenne ( Cecilia Malmström), le Service d’action extérieure [...]

Predictably enough, the Gaddafi father and son team is blaming everyone for Libya’s popular uprising, from Al Qaeda to Western television networks. To make matters worse, Mrs Clinton’s background noise, unhelpful and especially unwise, is actually fanning the crisis. Her counter-performance over the past few months is a painful reminder of rapidly vanishing US leadership [...]

OVER THE past five years, the US has witnessed a spectacular revival of its gas production thanks to newly developed technologies allowing the extraction of gas by injecting water and chemicals under high pressure and crushing rocks that contain gas at depths of several hundreds (or even thousands) of meters. Today, shale gas amounts to [...]

IT’S AMAZING what can happen in two weeks! Since my post on the “Year of (Arab) Revolutions” on February 13, the winds of change have hit Libya with a vengeance. Of all the countries in the region, Libya is the one whose fate will have the greatest short-term impact on Europe. The international community has reacted [...]

For the last 50 years Turkey and the EU have been toying around with EU membership. But at the beginning of 2011 they are not really advanced to the point where we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Negotiations for accession have been going on without enthusiasm for the past five [...]

A l’occasion de la mini-session plénière de mercredi à Bruxelles, la Parlement européen a  commémoré pour la première fois le « génocide des Roms par les nazis ». A ce sujet, le Président du Parlement, Jerzy Buzek a souligné qu’ « un tiers des personnes détenues à Auschwitz étaient Roms, mais la plupart des Européens l’ignorent », évoquant également [...]

Innovation is recognized as one of the fundaments of economic development. The machine tool industry is the engine for virtually all manufacturing activities and, to a large extent, enables other sectors to be innovative. The future of Europe’s economic importance and security is highly dependent on the competitive edge that we can bring to the [...]

On Monday, January 24th the Moroccan Energy federation celebrated its 10th anniversary with the publication of its founder’s new book “10 years of reflecting on energy choices”. The book is organised chronologically from 2011 to 2010, which allows readers to follow the evolution of energy policies in Morocco in the last decade. The country saw [...]